“As Channel 4 controversially celebrated women covering their faces and critics are dismissed as Islamophobics, Joan Smith talks to a group of women who fear the consequences of the veil’s acceptance.”
Independent on Sunday, 31 December 2006
Yes, it’s the familiar strategy pursued by Islamophobes of finding some Muslims who agree with them on a particular issue and then using this as a cover for attacks which feed into the wider media campaign being waged against the entire Muslim community. You’d have hoped that people wouldn’t fall for this, but they do. The irony here is that Khadijah Atkinson, the presenter of Channel 4’s “alternative Christmas message”, is a member of Minhaj-ul-Quran, which has aligned itself with an Islamophobic campaign against the proposed so-called “mega-mosque” in Newham. And now some of her fellow Muslims are collaborating with an anti-Islamic bigot like Joan Smith in attacking Khadijah and other veiled women. It’s not really the business of Islamophobia Watch to intervene in these matters, but surely some basic solidarity and an elementary sense of tactics wouldn’t come amiss here?
For the sort of comment Smith’s article has prompted from right-wing bloggers, see here and here.
Joan Smith complains that “we now have a growing minority of the population demanding the right to go about their everyday business in masks, which is what the word ‘niqab’ means in Arabic. This, I think, is where a lot of people discover the limits of tolerance … rightly perceiving that the face-covering is not so much an obligatory religious requirement as a challenge to the values of our largely secular society….
Muslim women should be banned from wearing the veil, to improve security and cohesion in Britain, the Church of England’s only Asian bishop has said. The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, urged the Government to introduce legislation that would force Muslims to remove the veil when they are at work or travelling.
“The sharp differences in how the papers reacted to the verdict in the trial of the killers of policewoman Sharon Beshinivsky this week exposed the media’s vicious racism and Islamophobia. After all, it’s tough being a newspaper editor. Should we use page 1 to bash the Muslims, or the asylum seekers? Decisions, decisions…”
“Can you go one better than Britain’s security staff and spot the villain in the veil?” the Daily Star asks its readers.
“One of the lethal confusions generated by the multicultural paralysis is the reluctance to acknowledge ideological weapons being deployed against the free world which masquerade as religious piety”, Melanie Phillips tells us.